And, most appropriately, the conversation's been picked up and carried on by John, John and Mark here on Feeding the Puppy.

I just wanted to add a couple of things to the debate:

1. Purpose ideas are what really drive brilliant businesses and make them worthwhile engaging with, either as an employee or customer (as per my comment at Feeding the Puppy).

Of course, you can have a business that measures itself purely in terms of financials and many out there are like this BUT (and it's a big BUT) if you want yours to outperform financial businesses you need to build your business on something beyond money, on something that connects with the world outside, on something that really matters to you (and hopefully your customers). For too long we've thought about the world of business merely as an economic sphere when the important piece has always been the connection of the business with a broader public, "society", say. Purpose-ideas help us reforge that connection and rebalance the equation.

2. That's why (Mark, are you listening?) you can build you PI around almost anything - anything that is, except money

3. That said, John's comments (and of course, Hugh's musings, too) point up that the dangers of just having a social object without it being routed in something you really believe in. What they're criticising is, if you like, social object-as-tactic, rather than social object-as-strategy. As we get used to the social thing, I suspect, we're going to need social objects connected back - rooted, maybe - to something that really matters to the brand or company or whatever. This is why the connection Hugh argues for is so important - it goes beyond mere sociality...

And, most appropriately, the conversation's been picked up and carried on by John, John and Mark here on Feeding the Puppy.

I just wanted to add a couple of things to the debate:

1. Purpose ideas are what really drive brilliant businesses and make them worthwhile engaging with, either as an employee or customer (as per my comment at Feeding the Puppy).

Of course, you can have a business that measures itself purely in terms of financials and many out there are like this BUT (and it's a big BUT) if you want yours to outperform financial businesses you need to build your business on something beyond money, on something that connects with the world outside, on something that really matters to you (and hopefully your customers). For too long we've thought about the world of business merely as an economic sphere when the important piece has always been the connection of the business with a broader public, "society", say. Purpose-ideas help us reforge that connection and rebalance the equation.

2. That's why (Mark, are you listening?) you can build you PI around almost anything - anything that is, except money

3. That said, John's comments (and of course, Hugh's musings, too) point up that the dangers of just having a social object without it being routed in something you really believe in. What they're criticising is, if you like, social object-as-tactic, rather than social object-as-strategy. As we get used to the social thing, I suspect, we're going to need social objects connected back - rooted, maybe - to something that really matters to the brand or company or whatever. This is why the connection Hugh argues for is so important - it goes beyond mere sociality...

August 16, 2010

[Nudging aka] "Libertarian paternalism" bears the same theological relationship to Friedmanite economics...as intelligent design does to creationism. It strips out the demonstrably false aspects of the doctrine and gives it a makeover. After the the banking crisis, the belief that markets work perfectly was as unsustainable as the belief that God created the world in 4004 BC. Nudge comes to the rescue, proposing ways to make markets work better without directly interfering with them, still less peanlising those who grow rich from them.

Or, rather more bluntly,

...It argues that there's nothing wrong with markets only with people and the state's role is to make people fit for markets and not the other way about

Now whether you buy this [alleged] use of the insights that Behavioral Economics allows us, what's clear is that many folk are just using it as a sticking plaster or worse still, a cover for what they wanted to keep on doing anyway or keep on believing; it's far from the radical disruptive force for rethinking things that some (like my chum Rory) would have us believe.

As I've often argued before, the danger of BE is not that folk don't believe it or adopt it but rather that they just stop at the easy "aren't we humans a funny old bunch of faulty individual economic agents" analysis and don't take the bigger - and much braver - step into grasping the social stuff firmly...

August 15, 2010

A week ago, one of the UK's most senior physicians (Prof Steve Field, head of the Royal College of General Practitioners) had a provocative piece published in the Observer about the need for Brits to take personal responsibility for their own individual health.

"The truth is that too many of us neglect our health, and this is leading to increasing levels of illness and early death"

Few of us can disagree with this (although a longer term view might find a comparison with Victorian Britain's health illuninating).

Where the good Doctor stirred things up is by criticising the fact that most of don't like to be told our lifestyle is unhealthy.

"Too many people do not face up to the hard facts, as they perceive them to be an attack aimed, in particular, at the poorer members of society. But it is impossible to argue on medical or ethical grounds that such behaviour is acceptable."

At the time, I found myself pondering (from the safe distance of Brittany) how little understanding of behaviour change and how such things as obesity and smoking (and their healthier corollories) spresd such a senior medical professional seemed to have. Telling people what they ought to do, even giving them the facts is unlikely to change much - I knew the facts of smoking and its likely damage to my health but still persisted for years.

Much of it is considered and helpful but almost all of it misses the big point about this kind of thing: far from being "reckless" or "immoral" or "irrational" behaviour by independent individuals, over-eating, smoking and alchohol abuse tend to be things that spread through social means, as for example, Christakis and Fowler point out (in my fave book of last year).

We do these kinds of things because those around us are doing them, not because we are - any of us - acting independently. We are social not reckless.

Until the medical profession and their advisors get their heads around the importance of the Social, nothing much is going to change in terms of the population's health.

But, dear Minister of Health, leaving us to our own devices isn't going to help either...